Phydigital: The Universal Elixir of Marketing

The program started with Mr. Joydeep Raha trying to demystify the theme and how to bring it into practice. He talked about the two changes brought about by the connectedness of the Internet and the exponential rise and affordability of computing power. He also mentioned about asymmetric power and how market power has reverted back to the consumers as companies scramble to personalize products and services. He also highlighted how customer funnel has changed from AIDA to AIDAA, the last “A” standing for advocacy. Advocacy can create your brand or the collective power of customers can wreak havoc with your brand. He concluded by discussing the case study of Air Asia, which managed to build on these concepts and retain customers.

The panel discussion started with Prof. Sangeeta D moderating the panel. She introduced the topic by talking about “Peut Mont” which means a combination of two words. She mentioned two anecdotes, one from GE tagline of 1950’s “Live better electrically” and how we snigger at the tagline today but was the disruptor of those times. The second anecdote she shared was how banks used to incentivize customers to migrate to online banking at the beginning of internet revolution and how life has come full circle as banks try to woo back customers to branches as it is the touchpoint that provides an opportunity for cross-selling.

The panelists of the event were Mr. Vinayak Shastri, Head of Enterprise sales at IBM, Mr. Rakesh, Cofounder and CEO of Mobigenie and Mr. Shekhar Gaonkar, Founder of petcare.com.

The discussion started with how Data Science is leading to completely new business models and change in marketing theories. The panelists were consensual in their argument that the consumer will not change, it is the interface that will change and data science will play a key role in its automation. Mr. Joydeep Raha also mentioned the case of Maggi lead content crisis in India and how it took one month for the brand to react and caused huge losses. He suggested building advocacy in the product mix and available tools to mine social media data of what people are talking about brands. He also talked about models developed to measure advocacy such as PAR and VAR and classify customers into buckets of advocacy such as Good, Bad and Ugly and address them separately.

A case example of Google maps was mentioned along with how easy it is to carry everywhere we went and how trust in the product increased as we used more and more of it. The panelists spoke about the necessity of integrating all the channels at the backend to provide a seamless experience to customers. Mr. Vinayak Shastri spoke about the example of BestBuy of how they transformed their image from “A go-to place before you went to Amazon” to providing an experience based on trust and convenience to convert walk-ins inside a store. He also mentioned about an AUDI store in Central London that uses Virtual Reality to provide a driving experience to potential customers, generating highest no. of footfalls of any store and ROI globally. Mr. Rakesh mentioned how an auto parts company uses an app to reach out to 20,000 mechanics and win them through promotions such as bags and cashback. He also spoke about how all stereotypes are being broken in the digital world such as High Tech-Low Tech to online safe and offline not safe.

Mr. Shekhar spoke about how to go to market has become important and different in the digital age. Veterinarians have an important space in the pets business and spoke about a digital token system introduced by his company to help vets manage their customers better. He also spoke about a pet resort and what they are doing to attract customers such as running a contest on Facebook.

The panel concluded by saying that customer spray and pray approach will not work and customers need to be served relevant information by designing the digital platform and communication accordingly. The company also needs to trace the consumer journey when they switch channels and unleash sales force at the right time to convert the prospect into a sale.